I hear and I forget, I do and I understand, I see and I remember

Tag Archives: Traditional Culture

Interior Kiva at spruce tree house Mesa Verde CO

Sacred Light

Ancestral Puebloans built Spruce Tree House around A.D. 1200. It was re-discovered in 1888, and is the third largest cliff dwelling in Mesa Verde National Park. This Cliff Dwelling housed somewhere around 60 to 80 people. This is a view from inside one of the 8 Kivas found at Spruce Tree House. Kivas are subterranean structures that were most likely used for spiritual ceremonies.

This image is one of 12 prints in the collection “Art Within Architecture” on exhibit at Eastep Photography Gallery, 1338 Central Avenue, Sarasota, Florida, 34234. The prints can be viewed on Saturday, September 29, 2018, between 11 am and 4 pm. The Gallery is also open by appointment. Call 917.675.0640 or write WayneEastep@Gmail.com

I traveled 3,295 km (2,047 miles) from Almaty, Kazakhstan to the edge of the Caspian sea to make this image of an ancient Zoroastrian temple. The rituals are no longer practiced there so I brought candles to light the inside and show respect for their practice of using fire as a focal point of Zoroastrian rituals.

“Zoroastrian places of worship are sometimes called fire temples. Each fire temple contains an altar with an eternal flame that burns continuously and is never extinguished.”

For 1000 years Zoroastrianism was one of the most powerful religions in the world. It was the official religion of Persia (Iran) from 600 BCE to 650 CE.

While I was making this image a woman appeared at the entrance, came in and announced that she and her family were there to honor a relative who had died and was buried nearby in what the Kazakh’s call “the city of the dead”. She invited me to join them in honoring her relative. She turned and walked out.

A print of this image will be shown this Saturday, June 30, 2018, 11 am to 4 pm as part of an exhibit exploring the concept of “Art within Architecture”.

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The Bedouin of Saudi Arabia are one of the world’s most unique nomadic people. They survive in the Arabian deserts under some of the harshest conditions in nature.

The Al Murrah Bedouin tribe attracted my attention because they have lived as nomads in Arabia with an unbroken bloodline for 5,000 years. I figured such unique people would have important insights into human relationships. I was right.

Leading Saudi families in government, business, judicial and academic communities have sent their young children to live among the Bedouin for similar reasons. King ‘Abd al-‘Aziz ibn Sa’ud, the monarch who unified the Arabian tribes and created the modern Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, spent time with the Al-Murrah in the southern desert of Saudi Arabia.

When I began my career I decided to document the Bedouin in Arabia, specifically the Al Murrah tribe. This modest collection of images is from a library of over 25,000 images. They represent the book BEDOUIN which won the Pershke Price “Best Book” award and Gold Prize for the “Best of All Things in Print” the year it was published.